gluey messes and cardboard cutouts

These past couple weeks, I've just been having way too much fun instead of making any work. On my downtime, I allow myself to quietly panic about my last year at MICA and post-grad plans. To prevent this feeling, I've been forcing myself to go out. It's not the worst vicious cycle I've ever heard of.

The class I've been co-teaching this session at The Montclair Art Museum is called Team Sculpture. It's a class of about thirty kids who get together to make large scale sculptures usually, if not exclusively, out of papier mache. Honestly, I was a little worried, though even my worst imagined scenario was only aggravation. The class is only an hour and fifteen minutes and includes tons of paper, cardboard, glue and children. I anticipated chaos. After a week and a half of teaching the class, I can proudly say that the kids have completely exceeded my expectation. They are amazing! Not only are they as well behaved as thirty kids can be together, they've really been trying hard to work together to recreate some pretty intricate sculpture we chose for them. The theme of this SummerArt session is "Portraiture", so we decided to look at the portraits of Roman figures including: Julius Caesar, Augustus Caesar, Marcus Aurelius, a Flavian princess, Constantine the Great, and his hand.

Marcus Aurelius

Constantine the Great

dismembered body parts of the humungous Constantine sculpture

Flavian princess

Julius Caesar

I think they're pretty awesome, especially since most of these kids can't even look over their sculpture.

Also, I want to mention a band some of my friends are in called That's Rugby! If anything, check them out to see the typeface I made for their band name/album title :) Until next time.

foto fun + lite reading

I just got myself a scanner/printer, and I'm loving it :) I can explore a lot of different imagery really quickly. It's been fun. 

Also, I just got a few books out from the library. They are:

Sunset Park by Paul Auster

No Exit and Three Other Plays by Sartre

Oblivion by David Foster Wallace

The Aleph and Other Stories by Borges

Conversations With Jorge Luis Borges by Richard Burgin

I'm excited to get into them! More updates later.

catching up

I haven't posted in such a long time! For anyone out there, and for my future self, I'm going to do a bit of catching up. This post may be a little long.


So to explain why I've been neglecting my blog, I'm going to introduce my website that I've been working hard on to make my work look nice and pretty. After I was finished with that, I stopped turning to my blog. That's going to change now. I'm going to keep using this again as a place to give updates on my work and life in general. I deleted my Facebook after going through bored and addictive spells with it, and supplemented that with other websites, like Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram (dennislolcay) and Twitter (also dennislolcay). In truth, I'm not very good at using any of them, Twitter being the most confusing to navigate/understand, but they're fun.


In June, my post-Facebook and pre-Instagram phase, I went to Turkey (needless to say without posting any photos for friends and semi-strangers).  My iphone is helping me to get better at daily documentation, which seems to be a requirement these days, but usually when I travel (or just usually), I forget to take pictures until the last minute when I remember I want something to remember later on.  It's easier to do this when other people are around with their cameras. It's so fascinating that we want to remember having been in different famous landmarks (whose images are scattered everywhere along the internet) as opposed to "ordinary" things that no one else has seen.My dad and I walked to the metro nearly every day and no one, not even I, thought of taking pictures along the way. It isn't a glamourous area that my grandmother lives in, and taking a picture would seem almost like an insult, the way we take pictures of our cars after an accident: to document the damage. And taking pictures of damaged people and places (of which, besides being a spectator, we don't take any part,)  always seems like exploitation. If it isn't exploitation, why does someone want to remember something unpleasant?


That isn't to say the trip was unpleasant, it wasn't. I had a great time. It just wasn't what I was expecting. I learned so much about the city and so much of the language that I never had before, and it felt really good to connect to a part of myself which seems to be, superficially, a huge player of my identity, but never really was or could be.


Many times in the States I get asked if I'm foreign, or what country I'm from. Sometimes that makes me feel cool, but mostly that makes me think I speak English badly. In Istanbul, I would be mistaken for being Turkish sometimes, while most days I clearly felt like an outsider. This is a generation in which most of us have unique, cut-and-paste identities. I'm curious how people in the future will find ways of bonding, in friendship or in a war, when there aren't large groups of just one type of person. I'm sure it wouldn't happen for many, many years, but what is the fate of countries as we continue to mix and give ourselves different titles? That's just a bigger question I have based on this small feeling of never wholly being part of any one group/identity.


Istanbul epitomizes this duality or confusion. It is in the center of two continents. Wealth is next to poverty. Women and men lead totally different lives. It's amazing. I couldn't help but think what a confusing place it is to grow up in, at least in the poorer areas. I was on a bus, and a woman came over to me. She fixed my shirt so that my bra strap wasn't showing. It was an ugly bra, a sports bra, and the color almost matched my skin. She smiled, like she was doing me a favor, and maybe she was. The men were so strange. They stare as if a two-way mirror were between us. And I wouldn't blame them if they didn't make me feel so uncomfortable. On television, everything is ultra-sexy, much more than in the States. On the streets, women are wearing trench coats and babushkas in ninety degree weather. I felt naked in denim shorts and a t-shirt. Men wear whatever they like. In the richer areas, where people are taking photos and searching for wifi, no one stares.


In the end, despite having come to no secure conclusion about my "background", I saw and experienced a lot of beautiful things and formed a new closeness with my family that I had never known before.

the bosphorous sea

making plans for the next day

plates

basilica cistern

two kitties on pillows

at the archeological museum

at the archeological museum

at the archeological museum

at the archeological museum

at the archeological museum

When I came back from Turkey, I started teaching an art class for little kids at a place called the Montclair Art Museum. I had such a good group of eight girls, between the ages of 6-8. Very cute kids. I loved to see them get excited and invested in the projects. I was expecting a lot of problems in my first teaching job, but there were none.

self portraits in process

coil pots, teddy bears and cupcake containers on the shelf waiting to be fired

final display of their work

The class was only two weeks, and after it was over I went on two mini road trips: one to south Jersey, and another to Baltimore. In south Jersey I visited my friend Cassie at her shore house and in Baltimore, it rained. I had taken one of my best friends from home, Alexa, expecting the sun to shine the second we got there. It hadn't. We definitely ran into a few more bumps along the way, but I think it'll all make for a hilarious story later on ;)

shore house view at sunset

the jordan burrito, a baltimore staple food

Between all of that, I've been really trying to work on a solid story, or even just the outline of one. I wanted the form to be somewhere between a screenplay and a novel. Another ambition I have is to make the story have two alternate plots with the same prose. It's a stretch, but somehow I'm going to make it happen. I have a few ideas in my head about plot, but I have millions of beginnings of stories. No middles, no ends. To cope with writer's block, I started working on these embroideries that are going to have words which reference the elements of a story: who, what, when, where, why, etc. The lettering is mimicking typewriter letters.

Another project that I've been toying with is in the alteration of family photographs. I feel that the anonymity I'm bringing to the photos can allow them to be potential character in any story. I don't know how totally I'll connect these images with my stories or my other works, but I think that they're linked. These would also look nice printed on large, glossy paper.

Some books I've read and been reading lately are:

Great House and The History of Love, both by Nicole Krauss (wife of Jonathan Safran Foer). Very beautiful, and not typical. Something about her reminds me of Borges.

The Cave by José Saramago. Although I'm not liking it as much as I thought I would.
The Brooklyn Follies and Travels in the Scriptorium by Paul Auster. These are really different from each other, really well written and with fresh/complex plots.
Who Will Run The Frog Hospital? and Like Life by Lorrie Moore, who has such a strong voice.


Well, that's it for now. I start work again tomorrow (if I can get over this cold I have), and finish in four weeks when I go back to school. I'll have work in progress between then and now, so I'll be posting!
-deniz

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